Rightbloggers Flip Over Obama’s Transgender Toilet Directive

May 16, 2016

In my experience — admittedly mostly limited to godless blue cities — transgender women use the ladies’ room, and there is generally no fuss about it, nor concerns that, if they have penises, they will use them to molest their fellow toilet patrons.

But in North Carolina, a trans woman in the ladies’ room is an abomination before the Republican base (or God, if you prefer) and has been banned by law. Last week, the Obama Administration brought a civil rights suit against North Carolina, and issued a directive that all the nation’s public schools accommodate such trans students as wish to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify. Normal people who aren’t trans don’t seem to care one way or the other, but rightbloggers went nuts.

North Carolina passed its trans-in-the-bathroom law in March. (Georgia passed a similar law, though its governor later vetoed it.) A CNN/ORC poll finds most Americans don’t approve of such laws, but rightbloggers were generally happy to see blows struck against Mammon, and treated negative reaction to these laws (as expressed by other governors, corporations, comedians, and the NBA) as the Real Racism™, I mean the Real Anti-Anti-Trans Bigotry.

“LGBT ‘BATHROOM BULLIES,’ ” WorldNetDaily called them. “Sexual Predators in North Carolina have BFFs in Bank of America, Apple, and Google,” complained The Last Tradition.

“Days after he smeared the Last Supper as bland…NBC’s Late Night host Seth Meyers spent over seven minutes early Thursday morning viciously berating and decrying conservatives backing religious freedom laws in Georgia and North Carolina as segregationists alongside Christians, Chick-fil-A, and North Carolina Republican Governor Pat McCrory,” sputtered Curtis Houck at NewsBusters. (I take exception as well; the Last Supper was a seder, so the menu was understandably limited.)

Some of the brethren went beyond the boy-in-a-dress shock angle and claimed trans-bathrooming would enable creepy cis men to invade and terrorize the ladies’ room. “The media will tell you that around 1:15 p.m. Friday afternoon at a restaurant in Chicago, a scumbag tried to choke an eight-year-old girl,” quivered Conservative Tribune. “What they won’t tell you is that this crime occurred in the women’s bathroom of the restaurant.”

Hmm — when I look up the alleged perp, Reese Hartstirn, on Google News, the first headlines I see are “Man chokes 8-year-old girl in South Loop bathroom, police say,” “Girl, 8, Rescued by Mother After Being Choked Unconscious by Man in Restroom of Chicago Restaurant: Police,” and “Police: Man choked girl, 8, unconscious in store bathroom.” I suppose she could have been in the men’s bathroom, but that would not have been my first guess.

Nonetheless, Conservative Tribune went on, “And the reason this local story deserves national attention — but won’t get it from the mainstream media — is because it coincides with the larger debate about transgender bathrooms.” Then they yelled about Obama and his “free-for-all” policy, which apparently went back in time, spread from schools to restaurants, and caused this outrage.

“TRANS ACTRESS TO ‘PISS IN ALL THE WRONG BATHROOMS’ DURING NORTH CAROLINA TOUR,” Breitbart.com warned NC toilet monitors. “From his support of the legalization of same-sex marriage, to directing the Department of Justice to sue the state of North Carolina to now, issuing a directive on transgender access in school restrooms, Obama has put his finger in every pie — and licked clean every last morsel,” Nicole Russell unfortunately analogized at Conservative Review.

After comparing Obama’s directive to “WWII and jihad” (“evil men on an evil mission stage public displays designed to demoralize the populace”), American Thinker’s Danusha Goska appealed to her “transgendered fellow citizens” not to be a “tool” of the left by using the ladies’ room. “I appeal to you: reject this fascism,” she concluded. “Come to terms with the rest of us. Let’s work on a solution that respects everyone.” Here’s a bucket — see, we’re meeting you halfway!

A moment from the press conference during which Obama condemned the North Carolina bathroom billScreenshot via YouTube

National Review was, of course, completely on board. “Obama in his waning days in office is behaving more and more like the emperor Diocletian,” harrumphed Matthew Hennessey, encouraging readers to teach their kids at home, where they can make sure boys and girls use separate bathrooms. His colleague David French agreed: The education system is “stacked top-to-bottom with progressive activists even in red states,” he claimed, and called on such states to “consider rejecting federal education funding entirely” — which I’m sure they’ll be fine with, as “considering” won’t cost them any money.

The king — we might say the drama king — of anti-trans authors was the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, who is always on the lookout for signs of the collapse of society. The week before, Dreher had regaled readers with the allegedly true tale of “N.,” who brought her son to see the new Captain America movie, where “in line behind them waiting to buy tickets stood several men in their early 30s who were obviously transgendered, and a young woman who presented as a man, though was plainly a female,” said Dreher. “…the group started talking about sex, including their favorite positions, their favorite sex toys, you name it. One of the group was 20; an older transgender said to him, ‘You’re just a kid now, but when you turn 21, we’re going to take you out and get you broken in.’ They proposed an orgy.” This depraved scene took place in a north Texas town that, his informant gasped, is “home to three of the biggest churches in Texas!”

When Obama issued his directive, Dreher ran to the battlements: “Defy this cretin,” he cried, and warned, “…it won’t stop with bathrooms and locker rooms. The federal government is going to mandate the teaching of gender theory, at the risk of having federal funds cut off.” Not gender theory!

When a school superintendent in Texas announced, “[Obama] ain’t my President and he can’t tell me what to do,” Dreher was encouraged: “I hope the left thinks long and hard about what it, and its president, are provoking in this country, for the sake of pursuing their all-holy goal of forcing public schools to let transgenders pee in the toilet of their choice,” he said.

But later Dreher less optimistically wondered, “How much human wreckage will result from these new norms?” declared in italics, “It will never get better, not in our lifetimes,” and encouraged readers to consider the “Benedict Option,” a sort of monasticism with Wi-Fi about which Dreher is planning to release a book. Then he approved a Jacobin article about Democratic disaffection with the working class, which he related to transgender bathrooms (“It shows the priorities of Democrats. They would rather spend capital on appeasing urban cosmopolitans than on fighting for the working class”). Then he published an email from a reader claiming his friends who used to hate gay people were now “far to the left of me on everything involving LGBT+ issues” (maybe it was them at the Captain America movie!). Then he…

Well, you get the idea. The whole thing energizes the dead-enders, wins clicks, and makes a nice break for rightbloggers from trying to figure out what to do about Trump. And the great thing is, in a few weeks there’ll be some other outrage to get worked up over. It’s win-whine!